Flowable materials including foodstuffs such as cereals and the like and numerous other products have been sold in packaging such as boxes for many years. Such packaging is desirable since the packages protect the product from spoilage and physical damage. These packages also stack easily for shipping and for display on shelves. Packages such as boxes employ an inner bag that contains the product within the box. After the bag is opened and the desired amount of product removed, the bag is resealed, usually by folding the top of the bag over upon itself.
Such inner bags, however, are frequently difficult to open and almost never reseal effectively.
Recently, products have been proposed wherein the bag is outside of the box rather than inside the box. U.S. Pat. No. 6,908,422, shows a paperboard box inserted into a plastic bag that has a closeable zippered top. The box is inserted while in its collapsed form and is manipulated into an open position when it is desired to fill the box. This can create problems during use since the entire box is in the bag and can damage the bag when attempting to open the box.
Published U.S. Patent Application No. U.S. 2005/0194386 is directed to a zippered, plastic bag box cover for resealing paperboard boxes. The zippered plastic bag is positioned at the top of the box. The bag has an open bottom and elastic strip around the bottom edge of the bag to secure the bag to the box. This arrangement does not appear to provide an effective seal.
A similar arrangement is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 7,160,029. In the embodiment shown in FIG. 9b thereof, the lower edge of the bag includes a strip of adhesive at the bottom of the bag. While this may create a better seal in some instances, this seal does nothing to enable closure of the inner bag, nor to improve closure on the other end of the carton, thereby leaving the product inside the carton to be relatively unprotected from spoilage due to moisture and oxygen infiltration.
There is, therefore, a need for a combined container and bag that is capable of effectively sealing to the container. There is also a further need for a combined container and bag wherein the bag may be resealed after the bag has been opened.